CYBER THRASH
Eleven o'clock Saturday night, and I was headed for the DMZ
again. I had a feeling the Big Kahuna would be there--and that
he'd know what the hell was going on with the Cardboard Box. I
sure didn't, and it was making me nervous.
On the TV set outside my dim Brooklyn bedroom, the Cold War
was ending. Furious Czechs gathered in plazas, East Germans ogled
West Berlin shop windows--great infotainment, if you like rubble.
I was after a different story. No broken bricks, no raging
crowds, just phantom signals playing hide-and-seek through a
fiber-optic maze that slithered across the world. On the TV
screen the present was crumbling into the past. On my computer
screen a future was taking shape, and the Big Kahuna was somewhere
inside it.
Amber glow brightened the room as I fired up my bargain-
basement IBM clone and dialed into Telenet. The modem shrieked
and crackled and suddenly I was in, gliding down the Main Street
of the world's computer networks. I typed in a series of numbers
charging the call to a hulking defense contractor in the Midwest,
then I entered the 12-digit network-user address that routed my
connection across the Atlantic to a PC in France.
The cursor sat panting for a moment, then slid across the
screen, spelling out the welcome logo: bid block letters D, M, and
Z. I entered a handle and dropped on in. It was the usual scene.
A chat system capable of taking 25 callers at once, the DMZ was a
hangout for hackers and phone phreaks from all over the world. A
list of their handles glowed out at me from my monitor, silent and
serene, but behind it a phreak/hack Casbah seethed. All those
handles were passing private messages back and forth, cutting
deals, trading the short-lived codes, passwords, and other
fetichized bits of information that are the illegal tender of the
hacker economy.
But I wasn't here to cop. I was here to find the Big Kahuna,
and he was nowhere in sight. The list of handles glowed on,
losing or adding a name now and then.
There was nothing to do but wait.
In France? Wait in France for a kid who lived an area code
away from me? Things had gotten weird so fast I'd barely noticed.
In the beginning it was all as simple as a headline: On
October 4, 1989, Grumman Aerospace Corporation, a key supplier of
combat aircraft to the Pentagon, sent police to arrest a 15-year-
old boy for slipping into the Vax mainframe at Grumman's Long
Island plant from his bedroom in Levittown, New York.
It wasn't much. Just another hacker story in a year bursting
with them. The biggest was on its way to court: Robert T. Morris
Jr., who had loosed a worm into the defense department's national
research network, unintentionally paralyzing over 6000 computers,
faced five years and a $250,000 fine. Earlier in the year a
federal judge had sentenced 18-year-old Herbert Zinn Jr., a/k/a
"Shadow Hawk," to nine months in prison plus a $10,000 fine and
two and a half years' probation for sneaking into phone company
systems and copying "higly sensitive" software. On the book-tour
circuit, computer-security hero Clifford Stoll was out plugging
The Cuckoo's Egg, his nonfiction account of KGB-backed West German
hackers snooping for secrets in American networks.
Nineteen eighty-nine was shaping up into the year of the
hacker, and I wanted a piece of it the way some people wanted a
piece of the Berlin wall. I'd been getting more obsessed with
computers every day since I bought my PC, and more fed up with
writing record reviews. As things went, the Grumman bust was
small potatoes, but by the conventions of the emerging media
subgenre of the hacker story, it had the earmarks of a minor
classic--crime, punishment, feds, teenager, suburbia. I wanted to
write it.
Looking for dirt, I opened up the latest issue of 2600, "The
Hacker Quarterly," a Long Ilsand based 'zine. It was filled with
how-to briefs, updates on worldwide hacker feats and busts, and a
tough, political-minded defense of hacking and its constant
companion, phone phreaking (the high0tech defrauding of Ma Bell).
No mention of Grumman, though.
But hidden among all the other goodies was a list of computer
bulletin boards (or BBSs) loosely affiliated with the magazine. I
switched on the PC, called one of the numbers--a Westchester
exchange--and browsed a bit.
I'd been riding the tri-state boards for over a year, and at
first i didn't see anything so different about this one. There
was the usual pile of messages, friendly exchanges and occasional
swipes, points of information and wisecracks. Subjects ranged from
politics and music to personal computer tech--with discussions of
hacking and phreaking. But as the posted messages scrolled up my
screen I could see that the tone here was unusual in the generally
conservative world of BBSs. Talk was looser here, more anarchic,
and people used handles instead of real names and actually swore
without fear of getting booted by the folks who ran the board,
the sysops (system operators). there was a muted festivity to the
place, as if somewhere nearby, maybe in a back room no one would
tell me about, one motherfucker of a party was going on.
But there was nothing on the Grumman bust, so I scrolled
through the section devoted to hyping other BBSs. there wore some
well-pitched appeals for calls, but the ad that caught my eye
only needed its Long Island area code to bait the hook:
89Jul20 from the Wintermute @ YOYODYNE
Call: The Cardboard Box. 516-742-0801
My computer dialed the number, the modem connected, and then
suddenly I was facing the heaviest dose of paranoia I'd ever
encountered on a board. The BBS program asked for my handle (Dr.
Bombay) and then slapped me with a questionnaire asking me to (a)
declare that I was not an employee of any long-distance phone
company or any local, state, or federal lay enforcement agency,
(b) identify a series of cryptic technical terms and acronyms, and
(c) leave a note to the sysop, Wintermute, and his cosysops the
X25 Warrior and the Big Kahuna, describing some of my hacking
exploits. I passed the first part with flying colors, bullshitted
my way miserably through the second, and confessed in the third
that my greatest exploit was subscribing to 2600. So much for
that board. After that performance they'd never let me in. I was
back to square one.
A few days later I checked the board to see whether I'd been
validated. I keyed through the login procedure and waited for the
brush-off. It didn't come--I'd been granted full access. I was
in.
I cut straight to the message base and worked my way down the
menu. The e-mail section was unreadable, nothing but private
messages. The PHREAKING section was full of phone company techno-
lore and strange tales of making pay phones do things they weren't
designed to. In HACKING the messages listed phone numbers and
passwords for all kinds of computers--university, corporate, NASA.
PIRATES LAIR was the "wares" section, a place to trade illegally
copied commercial software. In CARDING there were messages on how
to scam other people's credit card numbers and use them safely.
The more I read, the wider my eyes bugged. Whoever these people
were--the Signal Jockey, Dan Hackroyd, Exile--they were hard core.
I shook the amazement and headed for the HACKING NEWS/BUSTS
section. A good idea: the second message that scrolled up
brought the news of the Grumman bust to the board, and in the
third Wintermute dropped the bomb that the unnamed minor in the
papers, on TV, on the radio, was most likely A-TNT, until recently
a regular at the Box. With this the conversation quickly heated
up. How could they be sure it was him? Would he narc? Would
they bust the board? As the days and messages scrolled by,
though, it became clear that the board was safe, and the questions
grew more philosophical. For instance: was A-TNT, or was he not,
a lamer?
Lameness, it seemed, was the ultimate sin around here, and
not everybody was sure A-TNT was guilty.
"He wasn't such a bad guy" wrote the Mecanic."It's too bad."
"People get busted because they get lazy," Mirage suggested.
But the Watchman wasn't going for it: "Lazy...lame...I don't
see much difference. If you make a mistake you're lame. So we're
all lame to an extent...but, whether your're the eLiTeSt hacker or
the lowliest kOdez dOOd, it takes a BIG fuck-up to get busted."
Whatever A-TNT was, though, he sure wasn't the whiz kid the
media was calling him. "Shit, he was asking ME for help," cracked
the Mechanic, "so you KNOW he wasn't no genius." But what else was
new? The media got it wrong again. Pretty soon the little lamer
would be on "Geraldo," repenting of his evil ways, frightening the
old folks with tales of sneaker-worshipping skinhead hacker cults.
"Why is it when you see a computer user on TV it is always
some total fucking modem GEEK?" asked the Watchman, clearly pissed
off. "Why don't they show computer users like us, chugging Buds
and dragging on Marlboro 100s in our Megadeth t-shirts and hacking
kool shit?"
I was starting to wonder myself. The moment I dropped in
here I knew I had found that back-room party at last. These
people were having the times of their adolescent lives, and they
were doing it with enough style and attitude to qualify for full-
fledged MTV-sanctioned youth subculture status. All right, so
maybe A-TNT wasn't a lamer, but who wanted to read another
morality play about a computer delinquent scared straight by a
brush with the law? The real story was still on the loose and I
was staring right at it.
The only problem was that a mountatin of hacker paranoia was
standing between me and the story. There are good reasons trust
is such a hard-won and fragile commodity down in the computer
underground. Since the breezy "War Games" days of the early '80s,
the federal and state governments have criminalized the shit out
of hacking--by last year every state but pinko Vermont had passed
laws against computer trespassing and "theft" and the federal
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 had made hacking punishable
by anywhere from one year to 20.
After a brief period of relative impunity, hackers were
beginning to go to jail. That kind of atmosphere tightens
definitions of common sense. On boards around the country, the
elite hacker group Legion of Doom was circulating a novice's guide
that warned against leaving your real phone number on any BBS("no
matter how k-rad it seems")or sharing real-life information with
any one you didn't know too well.
"Don't be afraid to be paranoid," the guide concluded.
"Remember, you *are* breaking the law. It doesn't hurt to store
everything encrypted on your hard disk, or keep your notes buried
in the backyard or in the trunk of your car. You may feel a
little funny, but you'll feel a lot funnier when you meet Bruno,
your transvestite cellmate who axed his family to death."
Still, I got the feeling that even if the dangers didn't
exist at all hackers would have to invent some. The main thrill
of the hack may indeed be, as the LOD intro insists, "the pursuit
and capture of knowledge," but paranoia is at least part of the
kick. As the pop culture industry is quick to recognize (see
horror-writer Chet Day's new book The Hacker for a deliciously
schlocky tale of an elite hacker board infiltrated not by the feds
but by a terrorizig demon handled "The Succubus"), the technology
just lends itself to cloak-and-dagger drama.
So it wouldn't do for me to start asking pesky-reporter
questions. If I spooked the phreak/hackers who populated the place
they might scatter, leaving the blood of a dead BBS on my hands.
I decided to approach the sysops instead. On my computer I
carefully composed a text-file suggesting we meet and explaining
my intentions and my sympathy towards hackers. Then I called the
Box, uploaded the text to Wintermute in the private file-transfer
section, logged off, and crossed my fingers.
I called back the next day, adrenalin rushing as soon as I
saw that I had private mail from the sysops. But it was only a
message achnowledging that they'd received the file. I called
back again the following day. No answer. I called later in the
week. Still nothing.
My nerves were frazzling, but at least the waiting gave me
time to browse the message bases and get a better picture of the
board. Slowly I began to figure out what any seasoned member of
the computer underground would have sussed at first glance: the
Cardboard Box was a hack/phreak board, dedicated primarily to the
mutual education of its members in the arts of second-story
telecommunications. According to Northern Illinois University
criminologist Gordon Meyer (I downloaded his masters thesis from
the Box's database), there are roughly a hundred such boards in
existence, varying widely in quality (the wares boards, where
uploading and downloading pirated software is the main activity,
outnumber the h/p's by about 20 to 1).
I also got to know the players. There was the Fone Ranger
who called in regularly from Chicago to rant about the lameness of
"warez dOOdz". There were one or two other out-of-staters, and
occasionally someone would drop in from England or Switzerland.
The rest of the 20 or so regulars were spread out between Long
Island and far Manhattan--not a huge area, but diverse. When
Exile, and inner-city caller of color, referred to A-TNT with the
generic "nigga," he got back a clueless response from the 'burban
Big Kahuna to the effect that the kid didn't appear to be black in
any of the pictures he'd seen. In the obligatory MUSIC section,
similar culture clashes flared and fizzled--the Mechanic, calling
from the heart of the Boogie Down Bronx, went toe-to-toe with the
metalheads and prog-rockers for a while in fuck-you defenses of
hip hop, house, and reggae. Then he gave up in a confession of
secret love for Genesis and Phil Collins.
I was learning all kinds of things. Except why the sysops
weren't responding to my letter. A week had passed since I
uploaded it. I called again, planning to leave a another anxious,
nudgy message. Instead, there it was. Contact.
FROM: WINTERMUTE
TO: DR. BOMBAY
SUBJECT: ARTICLE...
A REPLY TO #284
______________________
UMM...Well...OK I might be able to
manage me X25 Warrior and Big Kahuna
meeting you (sorry we cant give out
addresses or phone #s)...I have a few
conditions...dont put any real handles or
board names...also...I would appreciate it
if you would say clearly that hackers don't
destroy anything on a system, they just
want to learn how to use it...also...A
contribution to the BBS for a 38,000 BAUD
modem would be appreciated!
I didn't kick my heels because there wasn't enough room under
my desk. I just sent Wintermute a message saying I didn't think
SPIN would cough up modem money but the other conditions would be
no problem.
After all, why not help clean up the hackers' public image?
It was sad but true enough that the "threat" of computer viruses
has obsessed the media, which had in general been too lazy to find
out that in the hack/phreak community planting a destructive virus
was something you might do to a rival bulletin board but never to
a hacked system. And why wouldn't the media call bullshit on
corporate claims of huge losses to the computer underground? The
software industries were claiming they lost billion of dollars
every year to piracy. The phone companies claimed a million a day
bled to phreaking. No one ever pointed out that they were talking
about "theft" of goods that didn't disappear from the shelves when
stolen and would not have been used anyway if they had to be paid
for. Information technology had a tendency to make us information
peddlers--journalists like me--look stupid, and it was hardly fair
that hackers suffered for our lameness.
So sure, I would gladly do what I could to make amends, I
told wintermute--as long as we could meet and talk. "Just give me
a time and place." I said.
Another long week passed. Finally I got this message:
FROM: WINTERMUTE
TO: DR. BOMBAY
SUBJECT: ARTICLE...
A REPLY TO #339
_____________________
I am having problems...Nobody wants to meet you, they thing you
are gonna appear with a dozen cops or something...
For Christ's sake. I sighed and typed out a reply.
FROM: DR. BOMBAY
TO: WINTERMUTE
SUBJECT: ARTICLE...
A REPLY TO #341
____________________
What would it take to convince you I'm not a
narc? What do you want? My American
Express card number so you guys can fuck
my life up if I double cross you? I don't
know. This is a little depressing. I mean. I
only have about half a story if I can't meet
with anybody. What would it take?
The next day's e-mail brought this:
FROM: WINTERMUTE
TO: DR. BOMBAY
SUBJECT: ARTICLE
A REPLY TO #348
___________________
Well...if we wanted yur AMEX# we would
have it already...As soon as I talk to
Kahuna we will call you and see what
happens...
The bravado was gangster-movie perfect. I had to laugh.
But nobody called. After a couple days I logged onto the Box
again and got a message from Big Kahuna asking for my social
security number. I thought about it: I'd already given them my
real name and real phone number. What more could they do with the
SS#? I typed it in. Then I downloaded some bedtime reading from
the board's library of text-files and logged off.
I could have picked better bedtime reading. The file I'd
leeched turned out to contain two brief Newsweek articles by a
reporter named Richard Sandza. The first recounted his undercover
adventures as "Montana Wildhack" on hack/phreak boards around the
country. The second described the hacker response to the first
story after it appeared: Sandza was vilified throughout the
hacker world, inundated with crank calls, and found his credit
history fucked with and his card numbers posted all over the BBS
nation. Not a soothing tale. I managed to convince myself that
the reason he had caught so much hell was that he had used real
board names and handles. Even so, there was no telling what might
piss off some small group of hackers somewhere and set me up for
the same bitch of a time. I went to sleep sorry I'd given up my
social security number.
For days later I called the board. E-mail: the Big Kahuna
had discovered my address. Big deal. They already had my name
and phone number; they could have gotten the address out of the
phone book. I dashed off a quick dis and moved on to the next
letter waiting for me. It went a little something like this:
FROM: WINTERMUTE
TO: DR. BOMBAY
SUBJECT: CHECK THIS SHIT OUT
____________________
Y365-PROCEED
NM-DIBBELL, JULIAN
*DIBBELL,JULIAN SINCE 11/15/88
*FAD 11/8/89 FN-302 TAPE RPTD 11/88
*SUM-08/88-10/89,PR/01-NO,FB-NO,
ACCTS:2,HC$0-470,2-ONES.
*BUS/ID CODE RPTD OPND H/C TRMS BAL
P/D RT 30/60/90 MR DLA/ACCOUNT NO
01*9060N259 10/89 08/88 470 470 01 00
00 00 01 3719355233500
02 1*9060N259 09/89 10/88 0 0 01 00 00
00 10 3712389469900
END OF REPORT
My mouth flapped open. It was brief and pathetic, but it was
my credit history, and my American Express card numbers gleamed in
its midst like a pair of hot rhinestones. This should only have
intensified my fears of a few nights earlier, but all I felt was a
mixture of astonishment and admiration.
My hands groped to the keyboard to enter a reply. I didn't
know what to say. Suddely the cursor jumped out of my control and
started spelling:
Hey doc, it said
In a bedroom or a basement somewhere in the 516 area,
Wintermute had broken into chat mode. I typed back:
-HI. That is sum impressive stuff.
-Hey. It is no big shit...dont worry I wont post yur card #s all
over the place...
We got to talking.
-Uh, u mind my asking how old u are?
-Why u wanna know!
-Just being a reporter
-Well...should I make the story dramatic and say I am 11 or should
I tell you my real age?
-The truth would be fine
-Oh. well...I just turned 15 in September
Fifteen. Jesus.
-How bout the other sysops?
-Well X25 Warrior is 14 and Big Kahuna is
16-17 (I realy dont know)
-u guys ever meet in person?
-Yeah...me and the Warrior hang out all
the time. As for Kahuna, we've never met
-U never met him and you let him run the
board with you? how can you trust him?
-I trust him more that I trust you, I can tell
you that...
But kept talking. He told me hacking was fun and I should
try it. He gave me the numbers of some hacked-out systems to call.
Theis all took a long time. The cursor crawled across and down
the screen like a maddeningly slo-mo game of Centipede. Two
hours later my eyes were bloodshot rheumy puddles from staring at
the monitor and the conversation was ending on a sour note. My
questions had gotten too personal and Wintermute suddenly wanted
every detail worth printing off the record. As we said goodbye
and signed off I thought it might be the last time I heard from
him. I could see the whole story disappearing back into the
electronic depths it had emerged from.
I turned off the computer and shuffled out of my bedroom in a
daze. On the TV in the kitchen Ted Koppel was announcing the fall
of the Berlin Wall. Right now it was history, but in a few weeks
big fat AT&T, every phreak/hacker's favorite long distance
company, would be using this same footage in ad-spots, as if it
had been some basic human urge to telecommunicate that had smashed
the wall. They weren't entirely wrong. People were fighting for
a number of things in Eastern Europe, but would anyone deny that
the free circulation of news, stock market prices and music videos
were high on the list?
On the TV in the kitchen the nuclear age was completing its
transition to the information age. War, peace, commerce, fun--
none of these would be the same anymore. It was still possible of
course that the new age would turn out to be just a digital
remastering of the old one. We would measure the new stockpiles
in megabytes rather than megatons, but they'd be stockpiles
nonetheless--endless lists of data, names and numbers and the
power that goes with them. Still, as long as three teenagers on a
telecomm joyride could pick the corporate lock on those lists,
there was a chance things might be different this time around. I
might never speak to Wintermute again. But it was reassuring to
know he was out there.
Wintermute didn't disappear. In a few days he and the Big
Kahuna and the X25 Warrior started conference-calling my
apartment. I was never home when they called--I'd get in and find
a series of extended messages on my machine, three high-keyed
adolescent boy voices cracking jokes, chattering among themselves,
laughing uncontrollably and making rude comments on my taste in
outgoing-message music. It was like the Beastie Boys had taken
over my answering machine.
Finally they left a number I could call and leave a voice-
message at. They had pirated a voice mail-box. VMBs are those
automated answering-machine systems you get nowadays when you call
big firms, and it turns out they are eminently hackable: find an
unused box in the system, hack out its password, and it's yours
(most phreak/hackers use them as safe places to trade phone
codes)--untis somebody at the office discovers your coup and kills
the box.
The boys' VMB was still good. I left a time they could
definitely get hold of me. They called back. We talked for two
hours. I was full of questions:
Like, what was the point? What did you do once you got inside a
forbidden computer?
Well first of all you didn't destroy anything. That was rule
number one. But that left a lot of room. You cold take a look
at some pretty interesting things (the boys claimed that on a NASA
computer once they found a report about a fatal crash that never
made it to the press). You could also use come systems as
gateways to networks brimming with other computers. You could
even set up a hidden, parasite BBS. The Mechanic, they told me,
was in the process of doing just that on a Vax he'd hacked down in
New Jersey. But all these things merely iced the cake. The big
challenge was getting in. "Once you're in," said the Kahuna, "its
like, 'Ho-hum. That was fun. What now?'"
And what were the easiest systems and networks to hack into?
Well, Arpanet, the defense department's research network, was
certainly one of them. Then there were the credit report
companies--CBI, TRW. There were three good ways to get passwords
for their computers. One was to go "trashing," picking around in
the garbage of a credit-database client to see what carelessly
discarded printouts might reveal. Another was "social
engineering"--calling up database-users and putting on your best
grown-up vice to bullshit a password out of them. If neither of
these suited your style, you could always just trade for the
passwords with whatever cool shit you might have--a pile of codes,
some VMBs.
And what about the stereotypes of hackers? Were they math
prodigies?
No, not really. The Kahuna sucked at math in fact, did much
better in English. And none of the three knew much about
programming. Knowing how to program would help, of course, and the
most elite hackers knew at least one programming language, but it
wasn't necessary--hacking wasn't a system of rules, it was a
craft.
Well, were they loners then? Troubled kids?
Loners, no--they all had plenty of friends, Kahuna went to
parties on the weekends, played a lot of pick-up football. But
troubled? Well, they were teenagers. "All my friends are
troubled," said the Warrior, "and most of them don't know anything
about computers."
The boys were sharp. They were funny and in a gruff teen-boy
way they were friendly too. I liked them and I looked forward to
their phone calls, which began coming fairly regularly after the
first contact. I remained uneasy though. Every time I pushed for
a face-to-face meeting they would cagily put me off. My deadline
loomed and I still hadn't clinched the story.
I never even occurred to me that they might know the story
better than I did, but they did, and they'd been feeding it to me
in little doses all along, a code here, a password there. The sly
little bastards were trying to show me how easy it was to get
hooked on hacking, and they were doing a pretty dood job. The
rush I got when I first called the DMZ (called fucking France! and
didn't pay a penny!) kept me coming back for more. And when I
slipped into the Mechanic's Jersey Vax, my first actual illegal
entry, I suddenly had a glimpse of what it was all about. These
were low-grade borrowed buzzes, sub-warez dOOd activity, but they
were heady enough that I finally understood Wintermute's
uncharacteristically rapturous declarations that he would never
give up hacking as long as he live.
But I still had to meet the boys.
Then one week they didn't call. Caught up in other
assignments, I didn't have time to drop by the Box, But the
silence was making me jittery. I was jonesing for the
underground. I couldn't hurt, I decided at the end of the week,
to give the board a quick call and see what was up. I switched on
the computer and dialed up the Cardboard Box. There was no
answer. That wasn't good. If the hard disk on Wintermutes
computer had failed, it could be hours before he got the board
back up. When I called later that night the board was still down.
Fuck! Well, it would be up the next day.
But the next day there was still no answer from the Cardboard
Box. I was really uptight now. The boys' VMB had died and I
still didn't know any of their home phone numbers. The story was
disappearing again. There was only one way left to get in touch
with them. It was a long shot, but fuck it, at least it would
give me some kind of hacker-world fix.
So there I was, eleven o'clock Saturday night, back in the
DMZ again. I'd bumped into the Big Kahuna there a couple of times
before. Maybe he'd be there tonight. The list of handles was
long, but no Big Kahuna. There was nothing to do but wait.
Which wasn't so bad. The DMZ was a fun place to hang out.
You just sat there and people sent you messages. Occasionally you
got a racy one from one of the gay French locals who seemed to be
drawn to the DMZ by its high teenage testosterone count. No doubt
they presence flustered the hackers, who in general liked a fag
joke as much as the next American adolescent, but the hackers' own
approaches didn't seem a lot less prurient sometimes. "Got any
codes?" was the standard opening line. It could spark a nice
conversation, but as often as not it led straight to quick and
dirty exchange of digits.
There was a lot of codes-cruising going on that night. I was
having a hard time keeping up since I didn't have any to offer.
Finally I decided to just go ahead and identify myself as a
reporter and see what happened. The results were good: within 10
minutes I was carrying on two full-blown conversations at the same
time. One was with Gestapo, a 16-year-old New Age anarchist
Dokken fan from Phoenix. The other was with a guy whose handle
identified him as the sysop of the DMZ, said he was a 28-year-old
French based U S Air Force lieutenant colonel who'd been running
the system out of his house for two years.
Identity here was even more fluid that on regular boards,
since you could log on with any handle you felt like, and even
change your handle as often as you cared to within a single
session. I was logged on as "Scrump" at the moment. Last session
I was "Scratch." Before that I was "Richard Marx."
Scrump was getting sleepy. I was sending farewell messages
to Gestapo and the sysop when a message came through from someone
tagged Internet, and plainly identified as calling from the USA:
Hell-o.
HI, I typed.Where u calling from?
The USA, came the reply.
Great. More paranoia. Well, this would take care of
Internet: UH huh. Well dont mind the questions. It's my job.
I'm a reporter for SPIN magazine.
The reply took a little while to get back to me:
-Dr Bombay?
-Big Kahuna????
-OH...No this is Wintermute. Hi
-OH HI, man. Sorry I've been out of touch for so long...
-Well, its no problem. But you missed it...big shit at the Signal
Jock's house with Grumman security...
The news was bad. Sort of. Grumman security had traced the
Signal Jockey and a number of other local hackers trying to log
onto the same Grumman Vax that had been A-TNT's undoing. And now
were making house calls in the company of Nassau County police
officers and an unidentified guy with "fed" written all over him.
They didn't have a lot on the Signal Jockey so it didn't look like
they were going to press charges, but the story didn't end there.
The jock's mom knew the Big Kahuna's mom and told her about the
visit. After that it didn't take long for Mr. and Mrs. Kahuna to
figure out why their son had been spending so much time with his
computer, and boy were they pissed. They took away his modem and
grounded him for a year.
It got worse. One of the kids Grumman had swooped down on
was cosysop for Quiet Riot, a board in the neighboring 718 area.
Right away the other sysops pulled the BBS down, and Wintermute,
scared shitless Grumman would be coming for him next, took the
hint. He wiped all the BBS files off the hard disc and retired the
board indefinitely.
The Cardboard Box was dead.
In the week that followed Bush met Gorbachev at Malta, and the
boys agreed to meet me in Manhattan.
It was a strange and beautiful world. The military-industrial
complex had succeeded in killing the Cardboard Box, but there was
suddenly a good chance it wouldn't survive the century itself.
The postwar national security state was scrambling to find a new
rationale for its undercover shenanigans, but hackers were already
living in a world in which covert action was nothing more that a
game children played. The future was rushing towards us faster
than the past could get out of the way.
Appropriately enough, the boys and I agreed to rendezvous in
front of a science-fiction bookstore we all knew. The Kahuna
wouldn't make it of course. He was still under house arrest.
There was some doubt about how we'd recognize each other, but
when the time came I spotted them before I'd gotten within two
blocks of the bookstore: two sweetfaced, slightly chubby generic
white teens, working hard at looking inconspicuous. One of them
looked like he had a couple of growth spurts to go. Both of them
had their hands deep in the pockets of clothes that looked like
last year's Christmas presents. I sidled up and muttered, "Got
any codes?" The boys laughed, and we all tried to quickly get
over the weirdness of having faces stuck to our names. The short
one was the X25 Warrior, the taller blond kid was Wintermute.
I took them to lunch. The Warrior got a cheeseburger;
Wintermute ordered ribs and insisted on Pepsi over Coke. They
cracked jokes with the waitress, awkward and wise-assed at the
same time. We talked about how they got into hacking, about the
superiority of their k-rad Amigas to my boring IBM, about the Big
Kahuna's bad luck. We talked about the Cardboard Box. Neither of
them seemed too sorry it was down. It had been going for over a
year, a ripe old age for a hack/phreak board. And with the modem
freed up Wintermute could do more of his own hacking now, spending
hours scanning out entire 800-number exchanges, shit like that.
After lunch we walked around. We looked in computer-store
windows. We dropped by a magazine shop that sold 2600. I bought
two copies for some friends, the Warrior bought one for himself,
and Wintermute shoplifted another.
It was getting late, I'd have to head home soon. "OK," said
Wintermute, "but first you have to do something for us."
"Whatever," I said.
"Well, OK. Well we'll give you the money, but um..."--his
feet shuffled nervously--"OK, can you buy us a copy of Playboy?
The one with Kimberly Conrad on the cover?" The Warrior Giggled.
We went to three different newsstands looking for that issue,
but none of them had it yet. Finally the boys decided they would
settle for a quart of Foster's. I'd never bought alcohol for the
underaged before, and certainly never dreamed the first minors I
did it for would be capable of altering my credit history, but I
didn't blink. They waited outside the store while I made the buy.
When I came out we opened the can right there on the street
and headed for the subway swigging. We were all grinning like
idiots.
At the subway entrance I turned and said goodbye, and the
boys walked off. They were going to catch a movie maybe, they
didn't know. I watched as they made their way past a nearby
newsstand. No Kimberly Conrad, but lots of headlines that
supposedly added up to the end of history.
From where I stood it looked like the beginning. New
struggles were brewing. Information capital was accumulating like
crazy, and the gap between the info-haves and the info-have-nots
was gaping wider all the time. Sooner or later it would come down
to a fight, and whether they knew it or not, kids like the Big
Kahuna, the X25 Warrior and Wintermute were among the first people
to be on the right side.
I saw Wintermute take one last gulp of beer. Then the boys
disappeared into the city crowds.
Written by JULIAN DIBBELL for SPIN MAGAZINE 3/90
Typed in by X-Ray .SPX (STboy)